Page 1 of Taken By the Ripper
London, England 1888
C
lara Thompson was one of the lucky ones. She made sure to remind herself of it every day, especially when her eyes drooped, her back ached, and her feet screamed for a rest. But at least she had a place to call home, and she didn’t have to turn to the streets for a source of income like many others she knew.
She blew a strand of golden copper hair out of her light gray eyes as she bent over a patient—a young girl at the age of ten—sporting blistering scabs across her skin. Heat emanated from her frail body, her face flushed red.
Using a wooden stick, she pressed it against the girl’s tongue, only to find red spots dotting her mouth.
Smallpox.
“You can get through this,” she urged her newest patient, but the girl only blinked sluggishly. “My mother and I caught the disease years ago.” She dipped her wash rag into a bowl of cool water and placed it against the girl’s forehead. “My mother was left weak after giving birth to my youngest sister, Norma. She didn’t make it, but I did. And you can, too.”
A pang of regret echoed in the chambers of her heart at the thought of her mother. She’d caught smallpox only weeks after delivering Norma and managed to spread it to Clara. Herfather, a doctor at the time, had quarantined them together, separating her from her sisters. Those were grueling days of her father trying to keep baby Norma fed while separating infant from mother. And poor little Mazie, her four-year-old sister at the time, hadn’t quite understood why her life had drastically changed, especially when their mother had succumbed to death.
A knock at the door startled her upright, and her gaze shot toward the sound.
“Clara, it happened again!” Mazie shouted through the door. “Come see!”
“Step away!” Clara warned, crossing the quarantined room in several strides over creaky wooden floorboards. “You know you are not allowed near this room.” Not when her sisters had never been exposed to smallpox before.
“But the Whitechapel Murderer has struck again!”
Everything else shamefully fled from her mind as she vigorously scrubbed her hands in the basin beside the door, barely managing to dry them in her haste, and slipped into the hallway.
Sure enough, Mazie heldThe Starnewspaper in her hands, the pages rattling in tune with her excitement. “Here it says they found her in an alleyway with her throat slit. But something wasn’t quite right about the body. They’re saying the murderer is mimicking an animal attack. But the wounds were so precise that it couldn’t be an animal at all.”
When her sister’s trembling hands shook the newspaper enough to blur the words, Clara snatched the periodical from her and peered at the article in her own steady hands. Her eyes flew across the page, jumping from line to line as she read the details of the most recent murder. Another woman. A prostitute, just like the last victim.
“They are calling him Jack the Ripper now,” Clara murmured, brushing her thumb along the ominous name.
“You don’t suppose his name is actually Jack, do you?”
She gave her younger sister a pointed look, one similar to her father’s disbelieving stare when one of them had said something foolish. “It’s just an alias, Mazie. Besides, you should not concern yourself with such matters. This is not exciting. It’shorrifying.”
She shouldered her way past Mazie and snatched a pad of notes from a nearby table, reviewing the symptoms of her patients as she made her way down the long corridor of the estate. She’d grown up here, living in a privileged household. At least until her father’s passing. Now it was her job to take care of her sisters, and there just wasn’t enough money to go around.
“Then you must have missed the part about the esteemed and handsome Claude La Cour hired personally to investigate the murderers. All the way from Paris.” Mazie waggled her eyebrows.
With a huff, Clara snatchedThe Starback from her sister and flipped the paper over to read the rest of the article. The article didn’t paint the local police in a good light at all, calling them lazy and incompetent, in need of a foreign detective from Paris to solve the case for them.
Due to his high success in catching criminals, Detective La Cour was widely known, even in England. But how hard was it to catch one murderer? If they were outsourcing La Cour, then surely the police really were as incompetent as the article depicted.
“You have no idea what the man looks like,” she replied, shoving the periodical back into her sister’s hands. The stairs creaked as she lifted her skirts and made her way down to the main floor. There in front of the unlit hearth sat Norma reading a book, oblivious to the world around her. At the age of fourteen, her youngest sister had begun to show a womanly figure. Clara was grateful none of them had to turn to prostitution to get bylike many other women she knew, and she worked hard as a nurse to make it stay that way.
“Oh, but I do,” Mazie insisted. “I heard he was spotted at the train station yesterday, and I went to see for myself.”
Fear climbed up her body, forming slowly over her limbs like ice in the middle of a blizzard. But then the chill dissipated with a sudden crack as hot fury thawed her out. She spun on her sister, and judging by her wince, she realized she’d spoken poorly.
“You left the house?” Anger seethed with every breath through clenched teeth. “By yourself? Mazie! There is a killer on the loose. You cannot take such risks.”
“But I didn’t go alone! I brought my friend Emma along. And she agrees that the detective is just as handsome as people say.”
Clara closed her eyes and took a few calming breaths to appease her racing heart. Her father had done this on more than one occasion to deal with difficult patients, and she found it helped herself in similar stressful situations.
Finally calm enough, she turned on her heel toward the patient rooms while Mazie followed at her heels. “I know Emma feels herself invincible with five brothers of her own, but you are smarter than this. I do not wish to see you become a victim ofJack the Ripper.”
To her discredit, the name on her tongue sent a thrill shooting down her body, a desire to learn more and live in the drama, so to speak, like everyone else who found a morbid fascination with the recent terrible events.
